April 22, 2006

It’s Earthday

This Earth Day, consider the planet as you do your body: Our health is intimately connected with the world around us. In addition to our need for clean air and drinking water, scientists are discovering new ways that ecosystems affect us. Destruction of natural wildlife habitats, for instance, can lead to humans getting exposed to new diseases.

"What we really need to understand are the implications that activities like deforestation, global travel and trade and agricultural intensification have for the spillover of diseases from wild animals," says Jon Epstein, Ph.D., veterinary epidemiologist with the Consortium for Environmental Medicine at Wildlife Trust. For example, avian flu spreads from wild birds to domestic poultry, from which it can infect humans, as happened in Turkey this January. "In Asia, it's probably about a billion contacts annually between humans and animals, and the chances of diseases like SARs, avian flu and Nipah fever go way up," says William Karesh, D.V.M., director of the field veterinary program for the Wildlife Conservation Society, who last summer found the avian flu virus H5N1 in migratory birds in Mongolia. He has also extensively studied Ebola fever, tracing it to "the consumption of wild animals, [which] is creating disease outbreaks and biodiversity loss."

For our own sake, we can act on behalf of the Earth's health and get others involved, at home, office, school and on vacations too. Below are some opportunities for consumers to help protect specific ecosystems and all-over resources, like Earth's atmosphere.

It's Earthday today.. Something that uncivilized people like us (middle-eastern) don't know about!!

As we have too many problems to look around, this kind of culture we can't understand so fa, cuz nobody tought us about it, nobody is talking about except rare, a lot of things we can learn & what's funny that it's already in our religion's (Islam) directions, but we still a little stupid to get it.

There's a lotwe have to learn, but we can't blame anyone but ourselves, it's something can be found inside of us, I guess …